Part I: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries – The First Proverbial Transatlantic Zoo

Individualism was buoyed by intellectual movements such as humanism that engaged with literature along philosophical, scientific, and spiritual lines, all of which dovetailed with the inclusion of animals as emblems of the human experience. And it was in Spain where Saint Francis de Assisi, patron saint of animals, performed miracles and founded his eponymously named order, which foregrounds increased interest in the roles of animals in the period. This order then took a leadership role in the empire’s colonization and conversion efforts abroad, with the first Franciscan convent established in Mexico in 1524. These missionaries and their successors learned Nahuatl, educated Indigenous youth, and became influential conduits for expressing Indigenous knowledge and shaping their knowledgeways, mythologies, spirituality, and cultural practices. These fundamental ways that humans have shaped each other parallels increasing awareness of how animals mold humans, and vice versa, through greater cultural and sociological emphasis on the relationship, for example, between dogs and their owners, and an increasing interest in breeding, which unfolds alongside early modern imperialism and bifurcation of humanity into racial types (Beusterien 2013).

This darker side of the Spanish renaissance, to borrow from Walter Mignolo, portends a completely different zoological reality (Mignolo 1995). It is during this period that the Spanish monarchy adopted its motto, Plus Ultra, which remains official today. Unlike the medieval period when Spain was socially, culturally, spiritually, and linguistically divided and struggling to assert a unified identity, by the early modern period, the country had shaken off centuries of conflict borne of the Arab-Muslim invasion of 711 and began to look abroad for more resources. To make sense of the outside world, to order and possess it, Spanish writers reached for metaphorical uses of the animal world, as Lope does in his conjuring of the “dorado animal” as an emblem for avarice in an unknown, Americanesque land (Sánchez Jiménez 287–304).

This sense of the animal other grows directly out of the medieval bestiary, the book of hours, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of the first bestsellers off the Spanish printing press in the late fifteenth century. Works such as these ones modeled ideal behavior and imparted moral lessons destined primarily for younger audiences, although Ovid’s work no doubt entertained audiences of all ages. When Jupiter desired to hide his adultery from his wife, he changed the woman he raped, Io, into a cow. This act of double dehumanization teaches audiences about unfairness, injustice, and the inequality of women in men’s eyes. At the same time, the episode explores the confinement of humanity within the vessel of an animal, incapable of communicating or altering their reality. Episodes such as this one from the Metamorphosis grew in popularity to become common subject matters for Spanish painters, who by the seventeenth century had become renowned masters in their craft. In this way, allegorical stories involving animals were rendered visually, whether through mass-produced book illustrations or the comparatively elite genre of painting, enabling those familiar with the story to witness them for perhaps the first time.

It is notable that works of literature have demonstrated a tendency to reinforce these metaphorical uses of the animal world, particularly through the Spanish treatment of non-Christians in the early modern period (Gilmour 236–54). After persecuting Jews for decades and instituting the Spanish Inquisition to police the faith of “new” Christians, the association of monstrousness with Jews and non-Christians in general had grown palpable in Spain at the dawn of the modern era. This way of viewing religious differences extended to other domains of knowledge as well. Spaniards, through the guise of colonialism, found American food sources limited. Suspicious of tomatoes, they radically altered the animal landscape by introducing domestic European species, such as cows and pigs, which flourished. In part, this was due to a population of people who could tend to them, whereas in Spain, thanks to the mass expulsion of Jews and Muslims from the late 1400s onward, the kingdom experienced a dramatic decline in its agricultural production (Wagschal 18). Works such as Gabriel Alonso de Herrera’s manual on animal husbandry, Agricultural general (1513), also served a second purpose: women had to assume running farms while their husbands were away at war or overseas; they also instructed their children in the family’s business.

On the other side of the Atlantic, animals became tools and mirrors of the colonial project. Non-European species were fetishized through the westward gaze that characterizes the epistemology of this period (Alves 2011). One of the more influential works paired images with detailed descriptions of the natural history of the Spanish Americas, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés’ Natural Historia de las Indias (1526). It was widely translated outside of Spain, such was the hunger among European audiences for knowledge about the Americas. Unfortunately, the work – like many of its period – misunderstood and foregrounded the strangeness of animals, collectively inventing New-World nature, as Elizabeth Gansen has observed (Gansen 2024).

Two centuries and several treatises later, the Enlightenment drastically altered the approach to documenting the natural world. Deliberate efforts were made to debunk the earliest mythologies and fantasies circulated by European authors about American animals, so as to only include scientifically verifiable information. Abolished were the monsters whose ecosystems thrived on the outer perimeter of the medieval European world – troglodytes, cynocephaly, and chimera. In their stead, early forms of capitalism mixed with cultural intolerance to exploit the beaver, jaguar, and Galápagos tortoise (Brito 2023). This new era of modern mercantile networks also mixed with the establishment of science as a key outcome of European exploration, which was not necessarily conducted by Spanish-speakers. The increasing mobility of scientists and scholars in the eighteenth century and beyond meant that the animal inhabitants of a region were documented by foreigners to the Spanish empire, such as Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, who, rather than othering new-to-them places, species, and animals, tried to bring an air of impartiality to their work (Wolloch 2012, 53–68).

As Europeans encountered and struggled to describe their new environment to their compatriots in Spain, the very humanity of Indigenous people quickly grew more prominent. Treatises such as Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1542) lobbied for the ethical treatment of Indigenous populations. The Valladolid debate of 1550–1 demonstrates the critical issue before authorities in their treatment of Spain’s colonial subjects: could they be enslaved, did they belong within the Christian worldview as described in Genesis, are they human? As the century progressed, the enslavement of Indigenous people was forbidden, although this came at the expense of dehumanizing Black people alongside an expansion of the African slave trade. In this period, dehumanization became a flashpoint that intersected with the animal world, either by dehumanizing humans through asserting animal characteristics or by critiquing the dehumanizers themselves as bestial.

As The Empire Writes Back (1989) explores, the Spanish early modern period concludes with a series of declarations of independence on the part of Spain’s colonies. As a result, throughout the nineteenth century, national literatures emerged in the former colonies that began to include Indigenous and mestizo worldviews that emphasized the animal world in different and novel-to-European ways (Ashcroft et al., 1989). This effectively forms the boundary of the first period of Hispanophone literary treatment of animals, which we have also demarcated with the onset and effective conclusion of Spain’s colonial enterprise.

Four chapters in this section explore the early modern transatlantic zoo, which has undertones of carcerality that build toward the eighteenth-century panopticon that informs how the zoo is understood and structured today. These chapters yield novel insights into the complex relationship between the animal and human worlds through relationships designed to somehow condition, control, punish, and contain the other. The first chapter, “The Transatlantic Bestiaries of Felipe Guamán Poma (Waman Puma), c. 1615,” by Lauren Beck explores how animals figuratively served as a way of critiquing Spanish colonial life. In his unpublished manuscript, Nueva coronica y buen gobierno (c. 1615), Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala offers his Spanish reader a history of the Incan empire alongside a chronicle that documents the Spanish invasion. Both components are contextualized by Andean and Spanish worldviews and historical knowledge. The document, which comes generously illustrated, features a number of beasts from both the European and Andean worlds with which Guamán Poma critiques his present. He draws on Andean concepts of hell and incarceration to describe the colonial experience while characterizing the colonizer as deviant and aligned with Biblical characterizations of the devil. He also re-draws the medieval world so that his homeland forges a place on the European mappamundi, thus taking up space that is otherwise obviated from western representations of the premodern world. This chapter examines the illustrations and associated textual descriptions of mythical, fantastic, and allegorical beasts marshalled by Guamán Poma to familiarize his intended reader with the difficulties occasioned by settler-colonial life. As Beck observes, they relate to the bestiary genre as a location for wisdom and morals meant to instruct unknowledgeable readers about the world around them.

The second chapter is by Penélope Marcela Fernández Izaguirre, titled “Monsters, American Animals, and Mirabilia in Gerónimo de Huerta and his Translation of the Natural History (1624).” In 1599, Gerónimo de Huerta’s Spanish translation of the Historia Natural transformed the work of Pliny the Elder into a contemporary source of knowledge on animals for readers in the seventeenth century. The 1624 edition, starting with written and graphic depictions, updates the classical work to include annotations in the margins of the original text and six woodcut sheets titled: “Tabla de las efigies de gentes monstruosas, animales, pescados, aves e insectos.” On the one hand, the book’s illustrations increased public readership by visualizing the monsters and animals they described, including some that during the colonial period represented unknown ethnic groups. On the other hand, from the perspective of collector culture, the images helped to increase the value of the work, making it an object esteemed to be of high quality due to its visual content. Texts like this one demonstrate the colonial relationships of dominance, especially visible as the translator positions himself within a Eurocentric light. Thus, American animals endorse the continuity of European history in America, but within the margins of the colonial process. This chapter examines the amazing fauna that continued to be included in the encyclopedic catalogue in Huerta’s translation, giving continuity to Pliny’s proposed architecture of the premodern world, and continuing the tradition of mirabilia all the while awakening European fascination and admiration.

The penultimate chapter in this section, “(In)human Nature: Discourses over the Distinctions between Man and Beast in the Indigenous-Language Christian Pedagogies of New Spain,” is by Tania Bride. In it, she focuses on the people who ministered to Indigenous communities in the Viceroyalty of New Spain and the translation of a wealth of catechisms, confessionaries, and other Christian teaching materials into Native languages throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. This chapter examines unexplored representations of animal life and discourses over human-animal relations within such texts to reveal the fraught dialogues between colonial evangelizers and their Indigenous flocks concerning the sacred and natural world. Through their doctrinal manuals in Nahuatl, Zapotec, and Chinantec, along with other Indigenous languages, friars and priests attempted to impose a natural order that distinguished humankind’s so-called rational soul from the body they shared with seemingly brute animals in order to uphold the Biblical hierarchy of man over beast. In turn, those efforts at epistemic control aimed to reinforce the colonial hierarchy of Spanish civilizing discourse over their ideations of Indigenous savagery. Yet, Indigenous people also contributed as informants and translators with alternative visions of shared animacy, spiritual interconnection, as well as notions of potential mutability between humans and nonhuman animals. This chapter highlights the subaltern voices of Indigenous congregants living with or even resisting colonial definitions of the animal world. Despite missionaries’ attempts to suppress Indigenous perspectives on animals and fantastic beasts, the translation process provoked an interplay between Indigenous and European Christian animal symbolism.

The section’s final chapter, “‘La natural inclinación se olvida:’ Animal Transformation in Cervantes” is by Adrián Collado. This chapter analyzes different Cervantine scenes in which transformations of real and fantastic animals point to the social, ethnic, and religious realities of the time. The allusion to different types of beasts, both real and mythological, that mutate and disappear, is a literary device that permits Cervantes to reflect on certain censored themes of the era. He focuses on the scene of the rented mule in “La gitanilla,” an episode in which gypsies and an aristocrat discuss the possible transformation of the mule for economic benefit, along with the various scenes in which men and women appear as wolves in Persiles. This chapter traces a hidden discourse about conversion. Following the critical work of Carroll Johnson, William Childers, and Rogelio Miñana, this study shows that human-animal transformations allude to themes of pure bloodedness while questioning the rigid social and religious hierarchy dominated by the aristocracy and Catholic church, to the detriment of marginalized groups. The study of the animals in Cervantes’ work permits the reader to approach a society marked by an obsession with identity and place of origin, where life, death, or exile decide one’s lineage. To be able to hide elements of one’s identity and change one’s nature thus becomes a question of survival.